Parading Patriotism: Independence Day Celebrations in the Urban Midwest, 1826–1876 by Adam Criblez (review)

In Parading Patriotism, Adam Criblez explores how urban midwesterners commemorated Independence Day in the half century culminating in the U.S. centennial. Initially, Fourth of July celebrations centered on civic-sponsored gatherings featuring parades, speeches, and toasts looking to the past to honor the patriots of the American Revolution. By 1876, however, private pursuits such as picnic outings, professional baseball games, and the purchase of patriotic merchandise dominated the day, and celebrants dwelled less on the past than on the nation’s potential. Criblez’s book nicely narrates the twists and turns in patriotic practices as industrialization, immigration, and the Civil War fundamentally altered ideas about ethnicity, nationalism, and commemorative customs. Postbellum midwesterners still celebrated each Independence Day to affirm their patriotism, but their competing celebrations betrayed the republic’s fracturing by class, ethnicity, and religion.

The book focuses on Fourth of July celebrations in five urbanizing areas of the Old Northwest (Cincinnati, Cleveland, Columbus, Indianapolis, and Chicago), but this is not a work of urban history per se. Instead, Criblez is more interested in the cultural history of regional and national identities, and he uses urban Independence Day commemorations to explore the emergence of what he sees as a distinctly midwestern strain of American nationalism. Parading Patriotism is a welcome addition to the historiography of American nationalism, raising important questions about the contested legacies of the American Revolution and the complex relationships between regional, racial, and national identities.

Without a shared revolutionary past, midwesterners had to forge their patriotism from scratch, especially in cities increasingly populated by German and Irish immigrants as well as native-born migrants. But the absence of tradition proved no barrier to patriotic posturing. As Criblez puts it, “Midwesterners contended that they were, somewhat paradoxically, not only archetypal Americans but that their particular geography and history uniquely positioned them to represent the best aspects of the American nation” (iv).

The project of constructing patriotic citizens on the urban frontier, however, was fraught with conflict. The best parts of this book detail the efforts of competing groups to stake their claims to American patriotism through aggressive boundary-setting celebratory cultures. In the early 1840s, for example, local temperance advocates staged Fourth of July commemorations by redeploying rituals to novel purposes: revelers recited the “Temperance Declaration of Independence” and toasted their liberty from liquor by raising glasses of cold water. Part of a broader effort to use Independence Day as a platform for the performance of middle-class virtues, evangelical Protestants increasingly scolded those who continued to celebrate “in the antiquated method, with Rum and Gunpowder,” as one reformed Clevelander complained in 1845 (35).

European immigrants countered by attempting to seize the mantle of patriotism. Criblez focuses in particular on Germans, who preferred to hold “our own celebrations . . . abandoning ourselves to the happiest of patriotic moods,” rather than participate in the sober civic processions “observed annually by the Americans in a mechanical and spiritless manner,” as one German immigrant insisted (58). By the 1850s, midwestern immigrants “monopolized all the sport, and parade, and patriotism of the day,” as one Columbus editor lamented (57). On the eve of the Civil War, then, Independence Day celebrations featured divided midwestern urban populations competing and sometimes violently clashing over ownership of American identity itself.

Though the Civil War produced a revival in civic-sponsored Independence Day commemorations, by 1876 urban midwesterners rarely gathered or paraded together, preferring instead to celebrate via family picnics, railroad excursions, or horse race outings. While traditionalists complained about increasing commercialism and lack of historical memory, one Chicago editor in 1866 scoffed that “those who desire to hear orations can easily be gratified by joining any chance party around a lager beer table,” where “the spontaneous oratory which one hears . . . is often quite as instructive as the labored public harangues before the multitude” (112). In other words, Independence Day still deserved commemoration, but not elite direction.

Parading Patriotism ably charts...